Whistleblower Edward Snowden has entered the debate over Australia's new metadata laws, saying Australia has joined other countries in undertaking mass surveillance of its citizens.

Speaking at a Progress 2015 conference in Melbourne via satellite from Moscow, where he has sought asylum, Mr Snowden said Australia's role in government surveillance resembled monitoring in the UK.

"Australia's role in mass surveillance around the world is similar to the UK and the Tempora program, which is what's called a rolling internet proffer," he said.

"Basically they use local authorities such as this metadata program that's been passed in Australia to collect everyone's communications in advance of criminal suspicion."

While acknowledging that governments must take steps to protect people from terrorism, he said the sort of metadata collection programs being operated by governments were at odds with free Western society.

"This is dangerous," he said.

"This is not things that governments have ever traditionally been empowered to claim for themselves as authorities.

"And to have that change recently ... is a radical departure from the operation of traditional liberal societies around the world."

"What this means is they are watching everybody all the time. They're collecting information and they're just putting it in buckets that they can then search through not only locally, not only in Australia, but they can then share this with foreign intelligences services.

"They can trawl through this information in the same way. Whether or not you're doing anything wrong you're being watched."

Metadata collection won't prevent terrorism: Snowden

Security agencies can access metadata with a warrant if they can make a case it is "reasonably necessary" to an investigation. Journalists have some protections under the laws, but Mr Snowden said those amount to very little.

"Under these mandatory metadata laws you can immediately see who journalists are contacting, from which you can derive who their sources are."

Mr Snowden told the conference in Melbourne terrorist attacks in the US have not been prevented by the collection of metadata.

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